Four men stepped up to the edge of the ship as we hovered several hundred feet above the island. I was too far from the edge to see the surface of the island, and the mana levels on the surface were too weak to reach this far. A good sign for our group. The four green-cored adventurers exchanged looks, then jumped. One turned mid jump and gave us a salute with a cocky grin. After a few seconds of silence, we all heard the thuds of impact, then the crack of thunder.
“That’ll be Darius’s cleave,” said one of the yellows. There were 12 of them in total, three groups of four. Another of the yellows made eye contact with the Adventurer’s Guild representative and gave him a nod. He, in turn, said something to the ship’s captain that I was too far away to hear, but the message became obvious as we started descending.
Just before the ship touched down, the yellows were jumping overboard and scattering. They quickly cleared the surrounding area, not that the greens left much to clear out from what I could see. The ship’s marines took over, setting up the perimeter, and then the yellows were off to help clear the dungeon. The rest of us lined up to disembark.
Now that we were on the surface, I could sense faint melodies from the monsters further out. When it was our turn to disembark, the guild representative stopped us. “You four are Orange 13, you’ll be going North along with Orange 1, 5, and 9. Do your best to not overlap too much with the others and try to cover as much ground as possible. Who’s the healer?”
Stephanie raised her hand, and the representative continued speaking. “Alright, I’m giving you the emergency signal flare. If something happens or you get in over your head, pop the flare. I’d rather it be a false alarm than you lot try and tough it out, so use it before you think you need it. Understood?” We all nodded. “Alright then, get going. Happy hunting.” The four of us all looked at each other, shared a nod, and walked down the ramp.
“Alright,” Bill said. “Get your personal protection flowing if you have it, and let’s rush off. I can vaguely feel the other 3 groups assigned to the north. We’ll head straight north, then cut east after a few hundred feet. Jack, I’ve got the shield, so I’ll take point. I want you bringing up the rear so nothing surprises our casters. Stephanie, you’re right behind me just in case bad things happen, and you have to pull me out of the fire. That leaves you third, Claudia. I’ll leave it to you to keep your eyes peeled since you’ll have better senses than Jack or Stephanie. Be sure to call out anything suspicious. As far as we know, it’s just beasts on the island. There shouldn’t be any tool users topside. Questions?” At our silence, he started cycling mana and headed off. We were just a few paces behind him in the aforementioned formation.
It wasn’t long before we encountered our first pack of shadow wolves. They were at peak red with the alpha wolf having broken into orange. Thankfully, it was daylight out, so we only had to contend with them jumping from the shadows of the trees, and frankly, that was difficult enough. Bill and I took up a light pincer formation with Stephanie and Claudia between us, and we both tried to deny space for the shadow wolves to attack the girls.
A wolf rushed me, but rather than focus on countering its attack, I focused on the shadows around me. As the wolf in front of me closed the distance, another sprouted from the shadows behind me to my right to flank. This was what I’d be waiting on, so I pivoted and brought my longsword up from its low guard position and caught it in its neck. I continued forward with the motion to dodge the incoming first wolf, spun, then, with my sword leading me, attacked its lower back as it passed me.
Maintaining our formation with the wolves jumping into and out of shadows was proving difficult. Another wolf sprang from a shadow between Stephanie and me. I angled the point of my sword down in its trajectory and let it impale itself. I didn’t have time to disentangle myself from the beast before the next wolf crashed into me. I was knocked to the side a step, but was able to stay upright. I kicked out, knocking the attacking wolf off to the side just as another jumped into my guard. I moved my right hand to a halfsword grip so I could actually swing in time and caught the wolf in the face and guided it away from. “You still good, Steph?”
“Yeah,” she called back. “I’m fine. Just don’t create too much space. They’ll probably use the shadows between us again soon.”
I squared back up in a low guard and fixed my structure. Beasts were different from a person, and most of my sword-fighting experience came from either sparring with a person or the goblins and hobgoblins on the first five floors of one of the dungeons. This was a completely different kind of challenge. Not all of the rules applied, but many things were universal, like controlling distance. Though even that was somewhat limited, as we were surrounded, and they could jump through shadows.
I circulated my mana in my preset patterns for strength and speed enhancements, forgoing a defensive one. “I’m going to bait a lunge,” I said. I took a couple of exaggerated steps forward before immediately jumping backwards, landing just to the right of my starting position. As planned, the wolf in front of me lunged, and one jumped from the shadows behind my original position, but now it was just to my left. Two quick cuts gained us two more headless wolves and nothing else left in front of us. I kept my focus on the mana in the shadows near us, just in case one on Bill’s side decided to be cute.
“Clear,” I heard Bill call.
“Clear,” I answered back and relaxed my guard. I looked at the bodies. I would have liked to have offered to store them in my ring, but the ring was more valuable than my power level suggested I should have, which also meant it was more powerful than I could rightly protect and keep. While I didn’t think badly of them, I also just met them. Instead, I pulled my skinning knife from the sheath on my hip opposite that of my sword, and knelt down to start skinning.
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“I don’t know if we’ll have time for all of them,” Bill said. “Think we should just get the ones in the best condition and leave the rest?”
“Yeah, at a glance, I’d say four are worth keeping. I can have that done in about 15 minutes if the rest of you don’t mind taking the claws. I think alchemists can use them for potions that offer a blurring effect.”
My time estimation proved mostly accurate as we finished with everything in 13 minutes. I stored the skins in my ring, which was far more believable than me having one to store the 12 full-sized bodies of the wolves, and we set off.
After two hours and another engagement, we reached a stream with a cave mouth set into a hill next to it. “Ah fuck. Caves. I hate caves. Everyone have a Light Wisp scroll?” Claudia asked. We all replied in the affirmative except for Stephanie. I caught her eye and gave her a nod.
“I have extras. Here, Stephanie.”
“Thanks, Jack”, she said, flashing me a dazzling smile that made my heart do stupid things.
Come on, Jack, focus. This isn’t a date.
“Same formation, and keep your senses sharp,” said Bill.
We cautiously stepped into the cave, our formation slightly tighter than it was outside, but still mostly the same. After a little over 100 feet, I saw it. Dread filled me, and I so desperately wanted to leave the cave. But I couldn’t. couldn’t. We were here on a subjugation mission. One that evidently included killing giant. Fucking. Spiders. My skin crawled, and my light wisp slightly flickered. My mana was becoming slightly discordant.
“Jack, what’s wrong?” Stephanie asked.
“Nothing.” I couldn’t look her in the eye. I’m sure the shame showed on my face, but we were on a mission. I needed to get my head back in the game. “There are spiders up ahead. Not sure how much farther, but I saw the glint off a web just now.”
That brought everyone to a stop. Bill slowly looked up and then let out a breath of relief. I could empathize; the height of the ceiling was the first thing I checked. Provided the spiders weren’t using stealth magic, which was extremely unlikely at this strength level, then we weren’t in danger of being flanked.
“Okay,” Bill said, “with luck, those webs are old, and we don’t actually have spiders in here. Feeding mana into my eyes, and I can see that the current path opens up a bit ahead. If it dumps us into a chamber, form up similar to how we dealt with the wolves. Hopefully, the ceiling won’t be much higher than it is now. We good with that?” A round of affirmative grunts, and we continued our journey into the cave.
Before long, the mouth of the cave opened up and dumped us into a chamber—a chamber with a very high ceiling. I immediately shot my wisp straight up and revealed hundreds of writhing bodies cocooned in webs, and one very large, very hideous spider.
“Fuck,” was all I imagined to say before the spider dropped down in front of us. “Claudia, stay near Stephanie and share Stephanie’s light. Send yours with mine to scout out the chamber. We need to make sure this is the only thing in here with us.”
“Got it!”
I dove to the side as a leg came crashing down where I was standing. With my focus divided between maneuvering the light wisp and trying to spy any other spiders, I was almost impaled. As I rolled back to my feet and continued to advance around the spider attempting to take its back, I started running the pattern for my speed enhancement. Everyone used tattoos for enhancements, and I did too. From an early age, though, I could manipulate mana in a more free-form manner, so I often mimicked the resonances of tattoos manually. This kind of magic was all about enforcing your mental image onto the world with your will. For me, that meant pushing my mana into my muscles until they were saturated, then setting my mana to song and matching the resonance of the Strength and Speed spell tattoo. Combining this with my Reaction and Mental Acuity tattoo, I was able to achieve a similar level of combat potency as that of an Orange-cored mage.
There was an immediate difference in my movements once the enhancements were active. I finished my cursory search around the cave and found nothing. Good, just the big one then. I sent a light wisp over to Stephanie and Claudia to give them more light and extinguished the other. I used the freed-up mental real estate to enhance my eyesight and charged forth towards the nearest leg. I brought my sword down in an overhand two-handed slash and bounced off the chitin. That wasn’t good. I risked a quick glance over at Bill to see if he had better luck than I did with his higher cultivation level.
Bill deflected a blow from a leg with his shield before quickly lashing out with a counter, and he bounced off the same as me. Fuck. The spider lifted multiple legs this time,and I took off for the girls. One lashed down at Bill, and another went for the girls. Stephanie’s force shield sprang up to intercept the strike, but it barely slowed it down. It crashed between the two of them, and the shockwave knocked them both to their knees. Claudia managed to maintain her focus on her spell despite the tumble and summoned a massive lance of ice that launched straight for the joint between the cephalothorax and the abdomen. The spider moved with the force of the impact, but there didn’t seem to be any visible damage.
“Fuck,” Claudia yelled. “Its chitin is too hard.”
“You need to saturate it with water. A lot of water. Or Superheat it,” Bill shouted from the other side. I made it to the girls and helped them both to their feet.
“I remember reading that they’re resistant to electricity as well,” I added.
“Fire it is! It’s gonna get hot! Jack—”
“I’ve got it.” I shoved more mana into my manual strengthening and durability patterns. I’ll need to be their shield while Claudia dumps as much mana as she can into the spell. I could feel my body rebelling against the duress it was under from the mana saturation. The spider sensing danger from Claudia’s mana gathering, tried to stomp on us repeatedly, but as each leg came in, I attacked. Using my body’s structure to push the legs off line and away from the girls behind me. Occasionally, I’d feel a surge of mana enter me from Stephanie to heal my torn ligaments and muscles as I continued to punish my body with mana to make sure I could hold my ground and maintain the structure of my stance as each leg continued to strike at us.
Bill wasn’t idle during this. He’d swapped weapons from a sword to a one-handed warhammer, and seemed to be timing his attacks against the lowest joint of the leg segments as they crashed around him—not to mention the swift dodges he was making to avoid the fangs of the spider. I could tell we were frustrating the beast when I sensed mana gathering at its spinnerets.
“Get ready to move, a web attack is coming.”
